Friday, October 14, 2016

You blew it up!

All of the idiotic arguments his cheerleaders made a year ago have been exposed as the magical-thinking B.S. they always were. He can win blue states! Name one. He’s expanding the GOP coalition! Really? Then why are Republican Senate candidates outperforming Trump in almost every battleground state? Many of the same people who said that we have to unify the party to beat Hillary Clinton now say that dumping Trump — the only possible way to defeat her (and that’s extremely unlikely to work) — is treasonous and were the first to scream that Trump voters should screw the down-ballot candidates because Paul Ryan said he wouldn’t defend Trump anymore. If you honestly want to limit the damage Hillary Clinton will do to this country, the one and only obvious thing you should be doing is voting to keep the Republicans in control of Congress. If you think the GOP won’t fight Hillary hard enough, fine. But do you think a Democrat-controlled Congress will fight her at all?

I feel like Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the beach. You people blew it all up. You embraced a man who has no serious allegiance to the ideals you got rich peddling and who had a vanishingly small chance of winning in the first place — even if he had been the disciplined candidate he deceitfully vowed he would be. Trump is now an albatross on the party and he will leave a Cheeto-colored stain on both the GOP and the conservative movement for years to come. If you want to limit the damage you’ve caused to the party, vote for Republicans down ballot. Vote for Trump too, if you like. I don’t care, he’s going to lose anyway. But I’m going to vote for Evan McMullin so I can look myself in the mirror and maybe, just maybe, leave us something to build on after the catastrophe.